Families seeking safety are traveling from town to town, moving in with friends and relatives and pouring into displacement camps in both Iraq and Syria. Humanitarian workers are struggling to keep up with the influx at sites such as the Khazir camp, shown above and below.

3. Iraq has already absorbed more than 214,000 Syrian refugees.

The influx from the three-year-old conflict in neighboring Syria puts an additional burden on Iraq's hospitals and public services. A school at the Domiz camp for Syrian refugees in northern Iraq is shown below.

Without clean water and adequate sanitation, the outbreak of disease is certain.UNICEF is trucking in 400,000 liters of water every day to displaced families and has installed latrines at the Khazir camp, shown above. When the militant siege of Amerli was broken in early September, UNICEF dispatched a seven-truck convoy with 45 metric tons of aid including water, hygiene kits and oral rehydration kits.

Hygiene kits are also among the 33 metric tons of emergency supplies that have already arrived in UNICEF humanitarian airlifts to Erbil, shown below.